Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Thursday, February 20, 2014

Inequality and the Sanitised Bully

We refer to inequality as if it is a conspiracy
perpetrated by factions within society rather than being simply an act of
domination by the strong over the weak. It is the action of human beings
everywhere, whether we disagree with them or not.Political parties manipulate inequality all
the time. The Right demands of us the freedom to make mistakes but of more
importance, it wants us to live with our mistakes, to pay their price for our failures, and usually, it wants us to pay for
their mistakes too.The Liberals
understand that we all make mistakes and want to protect us from making them in
the first place while the Left will demand compensation on our behalf. Of
course, this is a bit of an oversimplification. There is altruism in some
political policy but compassion in conservatism, liberalism or the left is a
necessity rather than a virtue of politics. If our members of parliament know
what is good for us whether we like it or not, their behavior is tempered by
another maxim and that is that politics is the art of the achievable;
therefore, fear of failure rather than respect for the electorate is what determines
policy.

If our politicians know what is good for us then imposing their will is rationalized by
means of political virtue. Of course they will always tell us that our
acquiescence indicates our agreement. But the reality is much more mundane. Britain does not have Political Action
Committees like the USA
possesses.If we feel aggrieved we
cannot simply petition higher courts of justice. Our voice in politics is heard
when our politicians want to listen.The
"Tyranny of the Majority" I referred to in an earlier article is what
our politicians use in order to maintain discipline within society.The European Union has magnified the
injustice within society by trying to ensure that every activity has the same
outcome.In leveling society it has had
to cater to the lowest common denominator in society without considering that
when we deal with 28 separate nation states we have 28 separate lowest common
denominators and not one.Frustration
and anger breeds discontent that the consumer society will be unable to appease
because not everyone shares either the vision or the wealth generated by the Union. Access that is a right and not a privilege creates
expectations which constantly escalate without reference to the prevalent
circumstances.

But the European Community (the EU) was an
American construction – a last attempt at civilizing the murderous ‘Old World’ which to outsiders appeared incapable of
containing its passions. Those passions had created centuries of hatred and
warfare.

So we have a different kind of domination
today. The tyranny of European parliamentary bureaucracy – tens of thousands of
regulations define every aspect of society. Those regulations define every
aspect of our existence: What may be called Camembert, what may claim to be
champagne, even the angle of a banana; in summary, what is permitted and what
is not.

It was recently revealed that corruption costs
the EU at least £100 billion per year.That is only £200 per person for every man, woman and child living in
the EU. But to put it into perspective, that is £200 that is stolen from every
one of us every year.

We could argue that peace has never been
achieved so cheaply or so painlessly.£12
billion per year is then, a peace tax for Britain, and perhaps it represents
good value. But that all depends on whether or not all that regulation and the
necessity to cede sovereignty deliver harmony or something else less
welcome.If society is gradually
becoming eroded and if our attempts to scale any heights are increasingly
curtailed by group-think and the terror of the collective we may one day wish to
return to an era of irrepressible passion vicariously or directly played out
before us.

Or perhaps we have already begun to take that
journey.We as a society have become
enamored of violence in our everyday speech and in our visual entertainment
(in our movies and in the ubiquity of aggression in our video games). The
popular movie franchise, “The Hunger Games” is one futuristic nod to the Roman amphitheater of two thousand years ago.It
is not so long ago that war was seen as a noble expression of manliness which
brought out the best in us.We have
advanced one hundred years so that we can now make our war games sexually
egalitarian while retaining their deathly malice.

Some of our music refers to our women and girls
as “bitches”, our music videos often add to their debasement rather than their
empowerment. We have opened many doors to equality while simultaneously we
facilitate the advancement of the pedophile, the rapist and the chauvinistic
thug.It appears that in honor of free
speech and civil liberty we are losing all sense of voluntary self-control.

The artistic and the intellectual thug, and the
professional demagogue are two sides to the same sickness that we have refused
to tackle for fear of violating our sacred principles. But those are the same
principles, the abuse of which undermines society and, whose misuse we appear to be powerless to
dispel.

Most non-Europeans did not feel the existential
terror of the Nazi era. It may be the
reason that in Britain
as well as in the rest of the English speaking world we misinterpret the
malevolent power that is represented by the Quenelle.The excuse that it is no more than a symbol
of social disharmony and the muted articulation of French frustration has not
prevented some from seeing in it the slow break down of French society; while
for others it is nothing less than a portent of the collapse of civil society. The
Quenelle is symbolic of all that is dysfunctional within society, a visual
representation of the poison within. We seem to have ignored the simple
undiluted fundamental here.The Quenelle
is a modern Nazi salute. Does it matter whether it is left wing Nazism, right
wing Nazism or Islam that fuels its popularity?

If we have re-awoken to an era of distractions,
of rediscovered faith outside of faith, of devotion to the mundane as well as
the hateful, it is perhaps no more than our latest descent into a void characterised
by barbarism.